Gov. Chris Christie's future is on a Bridge to Nowhere

Feb. 10, 2014

Written by

Francis

reilly

Francis Reilly

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Some things we learn to avoid through experience, like putting a hand over a hot stove, or riding on a bus with Harry Hearing. Other cautions come more instinctively, our minds conjuring conclusions from collected bits of knowledge, like resolving never to shake hands with Sheryl Crow.

We learn to trust those instincts over time, and we all live instinctively to one degree or another. Successful politicians, especially, depend mightily on their instincts to stay one step ahead of the pack of piranhas steadily nipping at their heels. In fact, solid instincts may be the single most essential ingredient to political success.

It’s been shocking to watch Chris Christie seemingly abandon the finely tuned instincts that accompanied him from New Jersey federal prosecutor, through the governor’s office, and on to frontrunner status for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Whether it was walking a GOP tightrope between his liberal leanings and the concentrated conservatism of his party’s base, or delicately balancing a Republican tax message against the dominant Democrats’ spending, Christie seemed always to find the right tone, knew when to convey compassion, when to professorially preach, and when to bull his way through with bombastic bluster, instinctively.

Fame is a fickle suitor though, and I believe Christie may well have fallen for the same media aphrodisiac that in recent years overcame both John McCain and Mitt Romney. They spent more time reading their pre-campaign press clippings than their tea leaves, and the instinctive lessons in the bottom of the cup were ignored in the face of faux-fawning by the liberal literati. In the process, all three abandoned what should by now be an instinctive Republican truth:

The media will love you as long as you are battling against your own party’s conservatives. But as soon as you become a threat to some liberal icon of the opposition party, they will throw you aside like, well, like yesterday’s newspaper.

It is not coincidental that the bridge over the river cry comes just after national polls showed Christie leading the media’s favorite president-in-waiting, Hillary Clinton. We can’t have that happen, so let’s make this stupid bridge bungle a national scandal. Let’s go 24-7 on MSNBC, let’s have the Democrat-dominated state legislature convene wall-to-wall hearings, subpoenas, perp walks, the whole megillah, and we’ll cover the hell out of it, make it a huge story, even a federal case. You know, kind of the antithesis of the way we’ve buried the IRS scandal.

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And so, we have the specter of Chris Christie, having ridden his carefully crafted post-Hurricane Sandy compassion into first place in the Acceptable Republican media sweepstakes, accentuated by his celebrated man-hug with Barack Obama, suddenly collapsing like a five-dollar card table in the polls.

While attention to the Fort Lee lane closure focuses on the famous Watergate-era query, “what did you know and when did you know it,” the political reality is that, regardless of the answers, Christie and his presidential ambitions are toast. He’s finished, kaput, outahere. I doubt he’ll even last another week as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, that role designed to explode his national popularity suddenly reduced to media scorekeeping over who refuses to be photographed with him. He’s become politically toxic, never a good thing nor easily overcome. Just ask John Edwards.

As to whether the Gov is lying or not, I suspect not. For if he had prior knowledge of this frat boy prank political payback, he’d never have so publicly castigated and condemned as a liar his former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, effectively destroying her career. That was an open invitation for her to throw him under the next bus, which has not happened, at least not yet. So no, I don’t think he knew, and no, I don’t think it matters. He’s finished either way.

Perhaps Christie should be grateful, though, since the bumbling bridge episode gave the media the opening to trash him early on, saving him all that time, energy and money before they’d only do the same thing in 2016.

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